Tag Archives: hawker

Wednesday 19th November 2014 – AND YET ANOTHER …

… visitor today. I really don’t understand why it is that I’m so popular.

It was Simon’s turn to pay me a visit. His wife is an estate agent and she has just sold a house to someone. The previous owner of the property was an English couple and it seems that they have left an old van behind on the property and the new owner wants it to be taken away.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I seem to spend a great deal of my time towing vehicles around and recovering vehicles from all kinds of places. And anyone who has lingered around for any great length of time will know that I’ve always been up to no good with old abandoned vehicles in one way or another.

But an old van! Of course, Thoughts about a Citroen “H” or a Peugeout D4A immediately sprung to my mind, but in fact it’s an old RHD Ford Transit. But never mind – it will have plenty of company here. After all, there are two other old Frod Transits around here, and that’s not counting Caliburn. I’ll have a play with it and if all else fails, I’ll break it for spares and weigh in the body shell.

So Simon was here for ages this morning and we had quite a lengthy chat. There’s asomething bubbling away underneath the surface here, and he’s noticed it too. I thought that it wasn’t just me.

This afternoon I had some paperwork and a few phone calls to make, and then I finally started work. I’ve rearranged the battery box that I built and I added another new battery in there. That’s now 1300 amp-hours worth of batteries. I need to take out the 5 old Hawker batteries and add in the other four new batteries, but in order to do that, I need to replace the insulation with something more substantial. This means a trip to Montlucon and Brico Depot.

No fire tonight either.

The temperature here dropped down to 14.4°C during the night but climbed back up to 16.8°C today – helped no doubt by me using the gas stove that I brought up here last night to boil the water for my coffee.

But I was right to light the fire last night. The temperature outside dropped down to 2.4°C last night and that’s the coldest night that we’ve had in this latter part of the year. Winter is just around the corner.

-1

Tuesday 11th November 2014 – BANK HOLIDAY TODAY …

… and so I had a lie-in until all of 09:25.

And then I spent all day working on the laptop and that was all that I did today. I didn’t even cook anything for tea. The only piece of excitement was Terry phoning me up.

But one thing that I have noticed relates to these new batteries. I had the inverter running for 14 hours today and at the end of the day, there were 12.6 volts in the battery bank. I’ve never had that with any of the old batteries that were here. And don’t forget that at the moment there are only three of the large batteries there out of the 8 that I bought, together with 5 of the small older Hawker batteries. I’m quite looking forward to having all of the 8 big new batteries in place.

-3

Wednesday 5th November 2014 – ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE DAYS …

… where things don’t go according to plan. And I need to have this place finished for my guests too.

This morning though, it all started quite well, although it might not sound like it.

The last few weeks I’ve noticed that the battery bank hasn’t been charging as quickly as it ought to be, and discharging quicker than it ought to. Furthermore, the overall charge has been slowly dropping overnight when nothing has been running.

I had a look inside the battery box and, sure enough, another one of these Hawker batteries has burst. And again, just as you might think, it’s the one that is at the input/output end of the battery bank. The burst was causing the battery to overheat and that was where all of the power from the battery bank was going.

It was therefore time to bite the bullet and start to install the new batteries that I bought a while ago – those enormous 200 amp-hour batteries that I can hardly lift up. This involved expanding the base of the battery box, and I’s started on that a while ago, but hadn’t finished. Nevertheless, by rearranging the surviving Hawker batteries and knocking out three of the breeze blocks that form part of the side of the battery box, I could fit three of the large batteries.

So that is what I spent all of this morning doing – reorganising the battery box so that I could fit the three large batteries in. And moving the three batteries from the barn to the house was quite something. lifting 58kgs from a standing start is one thing – actually carrying it is quite something else.

It involved a very late lunch, and with tools and rubbish and all kinds of things littering the nice, clean and tidy floor from yesterday.

Just as I had finished my very late lunch and about to go and tidy up everything, the phone rang. Someone has suffered a calamity and needs my urgent attention. And this event has occurred in Rouen, no less. Keen readers of this rubbish will recall that I had to go on a breakdown to Rouen just before I went off the Canada, and now I need to go back. I have to be there for round about 06:30 tomorrow morning and so this means that I need to set off round about now and find a place to settle down somewhere on the outskirts of the town ready for things to happen.

So much for my nice, tidy living room floor – and my plans to have both myself and the house all nice, clean and tidy for my visitors. And that reminds me – I wasn’t able to contact them to tell them what was going on and so I’ve been leaving messages all over the place. I hope that they will find at least one of them.

-2

Thursday 23rd January 2014 – I FINALLY MANAGED …

… to pick up Cécile’s letter this morning, after all these weeks.

And so seeing as how I was going to have a morning out, I decided to make the most of it, especially as it was once again p155ing down.

First stop was the Mairie. I need a form to say that I’m still alive (and judging by the smell around here, you would be excused for wondering) and the best person to do that is the Mayor of the village. They have a nice big and official-looking stamp that gives a really impressive look to any kind of document.

Then off to Cécile’s. I need to put an accompanying letter with this form and so I typed one out last night and saved it onto a memory stick. Also, Cécile sent me an authorisation to collect her mail, and so both of these needed printing. I have three printers here – one stopped working when it fell off the desk, the second only prints in blue and only when it feels like it, and the third one, that I rescued from Marianne’s, that ran out of ink on me.

So round to Cécile’s and her printer and – guess what?

Quite right. Hers ran out of ink too but there’s an override button on it and so we ended up with documants in light grey ink.

Nevertheless, the authorisation was accepted at the Post Office and I collected the letter. And then off to Pionsat and the Post Office there. That’s a real Post Office and so I posted my letter and form, and also a packet for Malou. When I was stuck in Brussels with no ‘phone charger for the old Nokia, she very kindly sent me one. And she’s a big fan of Edith Piaf and Marianne had a German version of the film La Vie En Rose. Malou speaks German fluently, and so that’s now on its way to Luxembourg.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, that was the morning gone. And so I’ve spent all of the afternoon firstly, picking up the bits of wood from the construction project to use as firelighters, and then sweeping up the sawdust for the composting toilet. It’s impressive that I can actually do that.

Secondly, I started to load up the new shelves. The little cheap lightweight shelf unit that I put in the downstairs room as a temporary measure, that’s now completely empty. There’s a pile of stuff gone out of the barn onto the new shelves, and a pile of stuff out of the verandah has followed it. And, much to my surprise, the shelves aren’t even half-full. There’s tons of room for more stuff.

This evening, seeing as I was in a contemplative frame of mind, I watched The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah rather prolongs the violence unnecessarily, I reckon, but apart from that, it is one of the most magnificent films that has ever been made and the performances of William Holden and Ernest Borgnine have no parallel in anything that I have seen elsewhere. It’s a film that is in my Top 5 Films of All Time and quite rightly so.

So what’s the plan for tomorrow then?

When I dug out the flooring to put in a large battery box, I made the box the size to suit the Hawker batteries that I use. However, one or two of them are starting to creak a little and I can no longer obtain the replacements, and so I bought a while ago some massive 200 amp-hour batteries.

The battery box isn’t big enough to take them and so I’m going to be making a start on digging out some more flooring and enlarging the box.

And why 200 amp-hour batteries? Why not go for anything bigger? The answer to that is a simple question of logistics. I can just about manage to pick up a 200 amp-hour battery on my own. Anything bigger and it will be beyond the realms of possibility, and I have long-since given up the idea of doing anything that I’m not able to do on my own.

-5

Friday 20th January 2012 – I CAN’T SEE …

… a thing right now in my room.

There’s a gusting wind blowing up outside and it’s in just the right direction to blow right down my chimney so every couple of minutes a load of smoke is blown back down the fire and out of the air vent into the room.

I’m being done up like a kipper just now.

But I was right about the weather – it’s rained for most of the day. And it is indeed nice to see the rail cascading off the new roof on the lean-to onto the ground, well away from the wall, and everything inside the lean-to being bone-dry for a change.

I can’t believe my luck with the weather for that 10-day spell when I decided to go for broke and do the lean-to roof. It’s not like me at all.

So I did some sawing of the wood this morning, but a downside of this now is that I’m cutting it faster than I’m burning it and I’m now running out of room to store it. I suppose that I shall have to make a larger woodpile, or a taller one or something.

I could, I suppose, even dig the trench that I need to dig at the side of the house by the “other” lean-to, drop the drainage pipe in there that needs to go in there and connect it into the drainage system, fill the trench with gravel, cover it over with a weed blanket and then build the real woodshed where it is supposed to go, but that’s not the work of half an hour.

After the woodcutting (which I managed to do without any interruption for a change) I did some more tidying up, starting in the lean-to.

First job was to rescue the remaining Hawker deep-discharge batteries and charge them up.

And here I’ve hit a problem, in that the battery box I made for the previous batteries is too small – the Hawkers are taller. But anyway once they were out of the way I tidied up in the lean-to, collected all of the stray solar panels and stacked them in a corner, and then hung up the smaller gardening tools so that I’m not tripping over them.

Having moved a couple of solar panels out of the barn I could then get in there and make some space to put the old Rutland wind turbine tidily out of the way.

This led to the discovery of a circular saw, not the 600-watt one that I can’t find anywhere at all, but the old 1050-watt one that was all rusted solid having been left in a container that filled with water through a leak in the barn roof when I was ill and which had subsequently been partly-dismantled for spares.

Of course, now that I have a 1200-watt inverter all things are possible, so I gave the saw a good spray with WD40 and reassembled it with some other bits and pieces. And much to my surprise it fired up!

Even more surprising was that the inverter didn’t even bat an eyelid.

The saw needs some “attention to detail” before I can use it to cut wood, but this is definitely progress.

This afternoon, with the weather deteriorating, I restarted work in the bedroom – the first time for God knows how long. I’ve fitted the false beam at the side wall – the beam that hides all of the electrical cable – and I’ve also packed out one of the plasterboard panels that didn’t quite mate with the others.

It was then that I lost the light and so I spent the last hour tidying up in the barn again.

And despite all of this time that I’ve spent tidying up, a I really can’t see any difference at all.

This evening by way of an experiment, I brought a kettle of water up here and put it on top of the woodstove. And after about 2.5 hours it was gloriously warm and I had a lovely hot wash and shave in front of the fire.

Definitely the highlight of the week, that, and I can’t think why I hadn’t done that before.

Next step is the coffee pot on the stove, and put the produce in a thermos ready for the following morning.

I ought to be much-better organised than I am.

-3